


Independence Center

by grievousGrimalkin



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Brainwashing, Corruption, Drug Use, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 10:48:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2770253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grievousGrimalkin/pseuds/grievousGrimalkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Accused of using an illegal drug that implants them with memories, Karkat, Vriska, and the other trolls are locked away in a mental health institution that aims to cure them of their delusions.  As the Independence Center's newest patients, they're likely the only ones still sane enough to get out.</p><p>Dystopian human AU set in a mental health institute.  One-shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Independence Center

**Author's Note:**

> Before you get to far into this, it doesn't fully explore the-story-that-could-be/the-story-the-summary-implies here. I could go much further with this universe than I do, but I haven't yet. Enjoy it anyway.

I first met her at one of our group therapy sessions. I had noticed the change in our usual circle the moment I’d been lead into the long white room: the nurses had set up thirteen chairs instead of the usual twelve. The eleven of us patients--inmates more like--sat in our usual order, sorted according to room number. I, as the resident of room eleven, was therefore seated beside the chair for the new arrival who would be taking room twelve. The doctor, who insisted we call him Doc, came in and stood behind his chair between Aradia, the resident of room one, and the empty thirteenth seat before addressing our circle.

“Welcome to another group therapy session, everyone. Today, we’re going to focus on introductions, as we have a new arrival.” He called to the door, “You can bring her in now.” I slumped back into my chair, huffing as I folded my arms across my chest; I’d heard all these introductions less than a month ago when I was first brought to the Center and was not looking forward to a rehash. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement as the new arrival was led in. Turning my head slightly, my eyes locked on her, and I couldn’t look away.

She certainly wasn’t pretty; I’d never say that I was staring for beauty. What she was, without a doubt, was intimidating, and staring at her was something akin to staring down a hungry lion; you knew that if you caught her eye at the wrong moment, she might bite your head off. The cast of her eyes and the cut of her frame evinced years of some wild hardship that had clearly seeped into her bones. She was short and broad with a tangled mane of black hair that coiled around her wide, stiff shoulders. She was already wearing her Center-issue white jumpsuit, which she filled out in such a way that it was clear that she was solid muscle beneath the uniform. She was also handcuffed, which was something new; I hadn’t been handcuffed when they brought me in to my first group meeting. 

One look at her face, however, explained the reason for the restraints. At first glance, she looked subdued, as the two, large, male nurses at her elbows were all but carrying her across the room, but her body was tense. Only I was close enough to see how truly wild her eyes looked, as though she were fighting the urge to knock out the nurses and run. The scariest thing was how completely obvious it was to me how easy it would have been for her to take them out, despite the cuffs and the fact that they were both a full foot taller than she.

When the nurses had planted her in her seat beside me and left, Doc had Aradia began the introductions. We went around the circle, telling our own stories from before we came to the Center, how long we had been there, and our experiences with the Trance. 

The now-twelve of us at the Center were accused of having used the Trance. We were incarcerated for allegedly tripping on an illegal drug that purportedly causes intense, psychotic, delusional highs. We’ve been told that merely one dose can addle the users’ brains so much that some have forgotten their own names or have had their memories sufficiently altered to forget their past and have a new one written over the old. Each of us patients has some variety of “delusion” that the government has blamed on the drug.

Stories ranged from the more sane, like room three’s Sollux who had once been convinced that the government was constantly spying on everyone via the internet, to the more outrageous, like Kanaya in room five who firmly believed that the fashion trends of the past 30 years were carefully manipulated by the government to convince everyone that the political higher-ups weren’t vampire overlords. By my reckoning, though, Gamzee in room eight was probably the only person in here who used any actual drugs prior to coming here, since his arrival story involves slipping (in his own poorly aimed piss) off of a statue in the Capitol’s main park after he’d been screaming obscenities and pissing on the cops who arrived to arrest him.

Me? I certainly don’t remember ever taking the Trance or any other drug for that matter, and whenever I point this out to anyone at the Center, they tell me that that was the Trance’s fault. I know myself: I would never have taken a drug like the Trance. The government simply wants to lock me up because of what I believe. In particular, my beliefs from even before I was sent to the Center hold that the Trance is a myth concocted by the government as something to accuse dissidents of in order to defame them against the public, to make the public less likely to believe anything they’ve heard a dissident say. 

The Independence Center we were being treated in, and the network of others like it across the country serve another purpose, however. In addition to keeping dissenters out of the population, the Centers’ primary goal is brainwashing. The aim is to make patients forget about and doubt the “delusions” that the Trance has made them believe. If those views were, like mine, something that was a central part of their life before the Center, those in the more advanced stages of treatment tend to forget large chunks of their past. 

This means that, looking around the circle of the twelve of us, you can see the entire process gradate from early to late-stage. Aradia, who has been here the longest of all of us, is flat; her voice has no character, her face shows little emotion, aside from an occasional, blissfully sheep-like happiness. The spectrum progresses all the way from Aradia’s bliss to myself, still fighting the pills and psychological treatments they try to throw at me, and now this new arrival.

The new patient sat staring at a spot in the floor in the center of the circle, not seeming to listen to anyone. She refused to talk about herself at all when her turn came, still staring at the floor as the Doc took up talking about her. I could see the muscles in her jaw quivering as she grit her teeth; something the Doc was saying did not sit well with her.

Her name was Vriska Serket, and, by the end of the meeting, it was clear to all of us that Vriska was a hardass, plain and simple. Doc told us she was in the war and a damn good soldier, having been decorated several times throughout her time in the military. All of this was, however, before she apparently took out her entire unit in a Trance-induced rage before giving the locations of several of our bases to the enemy. 

After her introduction, the other patients couldn’t wait to get out of that meeting. They were catching on that Vriska wasn’t quite right; none of them was accused of killing anyone because of the Trance. I don’t remember ever seeing the group rush out of a group therapy session and back to their rooms quite that quickly. I, however, apparently wasn’t fast enough to get out of the meeting, and Doc caught me and pulled me aside.

“Karkat, I want you to help Vriska get settled in, just to make sure there aren’t any…problems,” he said, clearly (and reasonably) anticipating trouble. “I think the responsibility will help you with your treatment, so I’ll put you in the same yard groups for a week or two, so you can help her out there.” We were allowed out of our rooms once per day for time in the yard, though they never let more than groups of three outside at once to limit socialization, shuffling daily which people constitute which group to help prevent conspiracy between inmates. The Doc glanced over at Vriska’s seat; she hadn’t moved. “For now, just see her back to her room. It’d be better for her, I think, if you did it instead of having the nurses do it again.” 

Seeing Vriska back to her room was the last thing I wanted to do, but I obliged; fighting something as simple as this would be stupid, especially if I’d need that same energy to fight the treatments they’d be throwing at me during my personal session later. I walked over to Vriska as the Doc left, and stood in between her and the spot on the floor she was still staring at. 

“Hey, Vriska,” I said, holding out my hand to her. Slowly, she looked at my hand, then at me, staring me in the face. “I’m supposed to see you back to your room. My name’s Karkat. I’ll be in the room across the hall from you.” She stood up slowly, still staring me down, though she was several inches shorter than me, and ignoring my extended hand, before turning and walking out the door of the meeting room. We took the stairs up to the second floor and down to the end of the long hall where our rooms were, mine on the left and hers on the right. 

The rest of the patients were already settled into their rooms, their eyes following us as we walked past their open doors. Aradia was laying out on her bed, smiling vacantly and staring with a blank expression at the ceiling, likely the only one who just didn’t care about a new patient. Tavros in room two watched us from the back corner of his room, peeking over his knees which he had tucked up to his chest. Equius in room seven stared up intensely from the floor, doing pushups at a fast pace. 

As we approached the end of the white hall, I tried talking to Vriska again, trying to get any semblance of a response from her. “Now, just go in and wait. They’ll be around momentarily to lock our doors and probably take your cuffs off.” Vriska didn’t look at me as she walked into her room, examining briefly the white walls of the room, barely wide enough for the tiny sink and toilet and the bed with the thin, white-sheeted mattress. A small bag of Vriska’s few personal effects that she was allowed to keep with her in the Center were thrown carelessly--by one of the nurses, no doubt--onto the foot of her bed, spilling the contents across the mattress. Vriska laid out on her bed, absently kicking the bag off onto the floor and staring up at the ceiling.

“Alright, I’ll just leave you to it then. Lemme know if you need anything,” I muttered under my breath, as I crossed the hall to my own room, furnished the same way as Vriska’s, though I did have the luxury of being on good terms with one of the nurses who every week or so would bring me a book to keep me occupied, though I was not allowed anything to write with in case I’d fall back into my old habits. 

Before I was brought to the Center, I was a journalist. I wrote for a small newspaper in the Capitol, and, late in the evenings when the building was deserted, I would let a dissident friend into the paper’s headquarters to print off pamphlets for the local underground movement. I had been working on a piece on the nonexistence of the Trance for years, focusing on how not a single user had ever remembered the experience or confessed to the use of the drug. When I finished it, my friend persuaded me to publish it under a fake name in one of the dissident papers. After my friend managed to get himself arrested and the government got ahold of a copy of the paper, their analysts compared it to my other work for the legitimate, government-endorsed paper and discovered it was mine. They arrested me, charging me with use of the Trance and sending me to the Independence Center. The Doc had since tried daily to tell me that the Trance is real and that I did use it, but that’s like telling someone they’ve been abducted by aliens when they don’t believe aliens exist. 

I looked at my tiny window and sighed, the frosted glass letting light in but not letting me see through the panes on the other side of the iron bars that kept me locked in my cell. I was weary of fighting the lies they were pushing at me; I wanted to be outside again instead of behind glazed windows and high fences. The nurse came as I stood staring at my window and locked my door. I then stretched out on my bed with that week’s novel and escaped into it until dinner.

At dinner, we all learned very quickly that Vriska was certifiably nuts (even by the standards of inmates in a mental hospital). By then, her cuffs had been removed, which I really wasn’t sure was a good thing. She still looked a little on the tense-and-crazy side, but I figured it wasn’t any of my business, as I walked with her down to dinner in the mess. We were the first two to get let out of our rooms for dinner, as we were released by cross-hall pairs to go for food. We sat across from each other at the one long table in the mess with the rest of the group filling in around us and dug into what was standard cafeteria fare, the same kinds of slop I’m positive I remember too vividly from high school for it to be anything planted in my brain by a drug.

Seats at meals weren’t assigned, so Eridan, the pompous resident of room nine who always tried to jam himself in as the center of attention, sat to Vriska’s left at the table. Of all of us, Eridan, the young heir of a real estate mogul who had apparently been sent here because he'd gotten mouthy with someone he shouldn't have, had bought in to the treatment far easier than anyone we'd seen so far, clearly prone to submission to authority figures and haughtiness to those whom he considered beneath him. Eridan hadn’t been close enough to Vriska at the therapy session to get the vibe that you do not fuck with her and quickly started up heckling her in much the same ways as he had to me when I had arrived, insulting my profession and my “delusion” about the myth of the Trance. As soon as he called her a traitor, I knew he was in for it. 

Vriska said nothing, but almost faster than I could track, she flipped her grip on her fork in her left hand and grabbed her spoon in her right, stabbing Eridan in the back with the former before going at his right ear with the spoon and now-free left hand, trying to cut it off. When the nurses had pulled her off of him, we realized she had actually partially succeeded in severing his ear before she was dragged away.

Eridan was rushed to the infirmary, and his ear was reattached to the best of their ability, though it never sat quite straight again. Vriska was locked in solitary on the third floor for a week, which took some pressure off of me to keep her in line.

Business went on as normal for awhile until Vriska was released into the general population again without any warning to the rest of us. She was simply, quietly returned to her room before yard time one day, and I didn't learn of it until we were sent out together, since the Doc still wanted me to help socialize her. We were out with Aradia who laid out on the pavement at one end of the yard, smiling blankly up at the September sky, if I was keeping my months straight. I walked to the other end of the yard, and, to my surprise, Vriska followed me. 

Standing by the fence, I turned, “Did you need something?”

She stared me down, and said the first words I’d heard out of her since she’d arrived a week ago, “I didn’t murder them.”

“Excuse me?” I asked.1

“At least not undeservedly. By that point, the government was as tired of the war as anybody else. They wanted it to be over, even if they lost some ground in the process, so they put my C.O. and the rest of my unit in charge of trading certain military secrets with the enemy, to let them take what they wanted of our resources and have the whole mess done with. The others didn’t let me in on their plan until after they’d already done it, at which point, I did kill them all, just like Doc said. They got some good soldiers out there killed with those leaks, and that didn’t sit right with me. I still haven’t figured out why my unit didn’t at least try to persuade me to join them, but I know that the story that the staff gave you all is a load of bullshit, and I think you deserve to know the truth, not some stupid story they cooked up to cover up what happened.”

I was slightly stunned that Vriska had started talking to me and confessing as much as she was as suddenly as she was, though I assumed it only made sense after a week without contact with anyone who was willing to submit to socializing with her. “So, why are you telling me this?” 

“You’re the only person who’s been civil to me since I got here, so I figured I’d take you up on your offer to help me out. So, clarify something, what exactly will they do to us? I’ve heard stories.” 

I gestured with my head toward Aradia, “That’s what happens if you believe them.” She looked glanced over at the woman still lying on the ground, before she looked back at me. “They want you to rid yourself of the delusions the Trance supposedly made you develop. Except, to do that, they have to change who you are, since that belief is usually so entrenched in your personality and memories and morals, that believing in it is a part of you.”

Vriska nodded. “Brainwashing.”

“Exactly.” 

“So how do we get out?” 

“Aside from giving in and becoming like that?” I gestured to Aradia again; Doc had recently told us that Aradia would be released shortly, as her recovery was complete and the Center could use the space now that everything was full again. Vriska nodded. “No idea.”

Vriska was quiet for awhile, turning to lean against the fence beside me, her past intensity fading as she whispered, “Vantas…What if you’re wrong?”

“About what?”

“About the Trance. Your ‘delusion’ that it’s just a myth.”

I swallowed and sighed. “So you’re asking if I think that what I believe is wrong? That we’re took some drug, forgot that we took it, and are now delusional because of it?" I threw my hands up in the air, fighting my damnedest to keep my voice low so as not to attract the attention of the guards. "I can’t believe you’re asking me this. Would you rather trust a government that’s made as many questionable decisions as they have or would you rather trust yourself?”

Vriska's taught face flickered with obvious anger at me for lashing out but the feeling clearly passed and she suddenly looked ashamed for even asking. I took her by the shoulders and turned her towards me.

“We’ve got to trust ourselves and each other. If we don’t, what hope do we have of maintaining our sense of self and getting out of here without winding up like that?” I asked, pointing to Aradia again. “We ARE right, and we will get out of here.”

At that moment, Doc came out, carrying Aradia’s bag of belongings. Two nurses stepped out to escort Vriska and myself to the door, but they didn’t follow us in and up to our rooms like they usually did, closing the door on the yard, leaving Aradia alone with the Doctor and nurses. 

We never saw her again.

**Author's Note:**

> This was actually a short-story I wrote for a college fiction writing class. I was hunting and pecking for characters to populate it with, so I worked in some alternate versions of the trolls, which is enough to qualify it to go here, in my mind. This version has some tweaks made to make it more Homestuck, like using the characters actual names instead of different ones (Karkat was Karter, Vriska was Varissa, and Aradia was Ardinia, for instance).
> 
> My biggest thing is that I want the reader to come out of their time with this universe doubting the reliability of the narrator. Honestly? I don't know yet myself if the Trance is real or not. It's something I'd have to figure out if I were to work more on it.


End file.
